Blog Relaunch

So I finally managed to find the time to relaunch this blog. When I first started the blog it was somewhat of an experiment so I didn’t spend much effort on its design, but unlike other failed blogs I’d started over the years I’ve really been enjoying writing these posts and I think this time around it’s got some staying power. This relaunch is really intertwined with my online rebrand I’ve been talking about lately, this blog plays a big part in my online image and it was important that I spend the time to focus on fixing its issues.

So the biggest areas I wanted to address were:

Domain Name

My old domain ‘blog.londonstreetlife.com’ had many things wrong with it, but mainly it was just too damn long.  The hows and whys I picked this domain are obviously very closely related to my rebrand so I’ll talk about it in another post, but this new domain is half as long and I’m really liking how it looks in the browser address bar.  In fact it’s so short i can pair it with my own URL shortener (instead of using bit.ly, for example) which will only help improve my online brand in the long run.

Switch from Blogger to WordPress

For all the work I’ve been doing with WordPress this past year and my subsequent posts on the subject, I’ve felt for a long time I really should be blogging on that platform.  I have nothing against Blogger or any similar web tool, it’s been great to me and I don’t see the need to host the blog myself as long as it provides me with everything I need and doesn’t limit me in any way.  However I have really been feeling the strain lately with Blogger, too many missing features, SEO failings, and little tweaks I am not able to make.  Now I’m on WordPress and am my own host and I can really go to town with this thing!  Like a kid in a candy store I’m having a lot of fun practicing what I have been preaching and I even built my own plugin which I will be cleaning up and making publicly available soon.

Design

The new design is the most prevolent update as it really changes the whole feel of the blog.  Whilst the switch from Blogger to WordPress could be completely transparent to the user, and the domain name change might not even be noticed by a user coming in via a shortened link, there’s definitely no escape from noticing the redesign.  I don’t want to get too into the color scheme I’ve gone with as it’s part of my brand color palette that I’ve been developing over the last month, and again I’ll be talking about that in another post.  It’s not yet the finished product I’m sure, I’ll tweak as I go, but time is short for me these days and I’ve found that eventually there comes a point where I just have to pull the trigger or I’ll never get anything done.  It is worth mentioning that whilst I do prefer dark text on a light background for readability purposes I really wanted to bring forth more of my personality into the design, so my words don’t just represent me, but also just by being here you already know a little bit of who I am.  I’m really happy with the color scheme, it is totally me, and it works really well for my portfolio site (in development) where impression is as important as content, but for here where content is king I might find along the way that the sacrifice in readability is too great for a blog and switch it up and around a bit, make it a little easier on the eyes.  I dunno, what do you think?  It’s really up to you guys!

It’s worth taking a moment to talk about my old design and how in a way it was sort of an anti-design, I’m not referring to the art movement but the fact that it was meant to look like I hadn’t spent a lot of time designing it (cos I hadn’t).  But also when I first started the blog I didn’t know where it was going to go or if it would even last so I really needed it to develop a personality before I could style it.  So for old times sake, one last time and forever remembered here, RIP old blog:

Blog Title

And finally the blog title, I’ve been seeing some of my posts come up in Stumble Upon and they’ve been coming across kind of silly – Blogger published the blog name first and then the post title and I couldn’t figure out a way to reverse this setting, so every post of mine that made it into Stumble Upon just said my crap blog name and didn’t give a clue as to what the article was even about.  That’s when I really started to realize that if I want the web to take my blog seriously then I’d better do it first myself.  Before the the title was just ‘my name the blog’, as in ‘londonstreetlife the blog’, which basically ran along the same idea as my anti-design concept above, and again I didn’t know where it was gonna go or how long it would last so I didn’t spend the time thinking up a cool name, and in the end it never eally had one.  The new name ‘Pixels from the Edge’ I think works really well, it kind of means a lot of things at once and they all apply.  I wanted the name to reflect the creative-technology hybrid thing I got going on and is mainly what I talk about in this blog, and I think it does that very nicely.  My lovely wife helped me come up with the name, so mad props to her!  And the more I think about it the happier I am with it.

So what do you think folks, turned out any good?